For the past 90 years, GoTo Foods brand Carvel — the inventor of soft-serve ice cream — has never officially partnered with an outside restaurant -- until now, that is. Carvel announced its partnership with Berg Hospitality Group’s latest concept, Buttermilk Baby, which opened in Houston, Texas in early September as an homage to the vintage soda fountain.
This brightly colored fast-casual establishment serves its eponymous buttermilk biscuits, chicken sandwiches and burgers on the savory side of the menu. On the dessert side, Buttermilk Baby offers 10 flavors of soft serve, Carvel’s iconic Flying Saucer ice cream sandwiches, and ice cream cakes like Fudgie the Whale, while bringing the Carvel brand to Houston for the first time.
“I have a business partner in Houston whose wife was from Long Island, and she introduced me to Carvel,” Ben Berg, founder of Berg Hospitality, said. “I was thinking we should bring Carvel to Houston, but I don't want to run an ice cream store.… I was thinking we could work this out and somehow convince them to partner with the Buttermilk Baby concept to bring Texas the best soft serve in the world.…When we met with [then known as] Focus Brands, they were surprisingly open to it.”
Berg said that once they were able to agree on a partnership, Berg Hospitality had to learn Carvel’s recipes to make sure its ice cream product was up to Carvel’s standards. While the Buttermilk Baby menu can and does offer almost any core Carvel product, it also offers remixes of products, like the boozy milkshakes on the menu made with Carvel’s ice cream, as well as a cinnamon roll biscuit concoction topped with Carvel ice cream. While the boozy milkshakes in particular might not sound in line with Carvel’s family-centric brand, Berg said the brand was open to creativity.
“They gave us so much freedom,” Berg said. “The biggest concern was that, god forbid, a child, gets a boozy shake. But by installing separate machines and a completely different cup, you get all these steps in place with us to make sure that it's totally safe.”
Moving forward, Berg said, his company will continue to work with Carvel on creating Texas and Buttermilk Baby-exclusive concoctions, including maybe an ice cream cake mold in the shape of Texas.
“The locals are blown away— I mean, nobody's had such a creamy soft serve like this before,” he said. “It’s real ice cream, when most soft-serves can’t even call themselves ice cream.”
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